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Happy New Year! may it be bubble-free

It’s the seventh day into the New Year, 2009, and the colossal squid continues to attract a huge crowd of visitors every day. We just love how much you are loving it!

We now have more than 23,000 wonderfully creative squid made on Build a Squid. More than 10,800 say they’re from the USA and there’s 6,000 squid from New Zealand.

Nicolai from Hawai’i wants to know how old the oldest squid is. Well, the first ones were made around or a bit before 13 December, so the oldest is now about 26 days old. Here are two squid you can follow:

“LucyRyan” from New Zealand who is now 26 days old, weighs 12 kg and has travelled 234 km. Today she is searching for a t-shirt with ten sleeves…

“Pamela” from New Zealand who is slightly younger at 23 days old, weighs 10 kg and has travelled 207 km – and has just seen a submarine.

The squid you see that are 0 days old are new ones made each day by visitors to the exhibition itself as well as online users. Te Papa is open 365 days of the year, including Christmas Day!

We’ll be working on plans for the Build a Squid interactive in the next few weeks. At the moment all the squid stay up and keep having more adventures.

On the bubble front it’s good to see that the troublesome bubbles in the tank have cleared quite a bit over the last two weeks. We’ll also be lowering the liquid level in the squid tank tomorrow evening and then carefully filling it up again.

We hope this will clear away the remaining bubbles and give everyone a bubble-free view of the world’s biggest invertebrate.